Excerpt from Season of Iron
Excerpt from Find me Again
Excerpt from To Die In Spring

Season of Iron (available in bookstores June 25, 2006)  Back to Top

Chapter 1 

Toronto, November 1979

People look different in hospitals. Quite apart from the illness. Even the self-confident ones become cowed in a hospital bed, frightened by their IVs, by the unequivocal nurses coming around to prod them in intimate places, by the specialists and students who discuss the ailment as if it were a gnome sitting on the patient’s chest, a third party, utterly separate and deaf.

Rebecca understood their distress at their loss of control and did her best to reassure them when they went into hospital. Always felt duplicitous because she so keenly loved Mount Sinai. She had to suppress a frisson of excitement whenever she walked through the doors. Magically, the tragic part of her life fell away. The black moods, the sleeplessness. She had trained here, an eager sponge absorbing knowledge, and now she was doing her part to make life better for people.

She stood near Mrs. Fiori’s bed. More than a year had passed since Rebecca had seen her patient. She recalled the robust energy of the stout but handsome woman, her thick dark hair sprayed into place. That person was hiding inside this pale rendition, the usual bloom of her skin now faded. Gently, she turned Mrs. Fiori’s hand palm up and, holding her wrist between thumb and fingers, took her pulse. No matter how she felt about a patient — not all were as pleasant as Mrs. Fiori — this somehow intimate gesture never failed to rouse in her a protective affection. Maybe it was the measure of their vulnerability, a reminder of her own, that struck her so tenderly. Mrs. Fiori smiled at Rebecca, her eyes still sparkling. This was not the time to tell her again to stop smoking. That could wait. She was fifty-three and had just suffered a stroke.

“How are you feeling?” Rebecca asked.

“Not so bad. Just tired. Can’t even do my hair.”

“It’ll take time.” Recovery depended on so many factors that she knew better than to promise anything. “I’ll come by tonight to check on you on my way home.”

Mrs. Fiori smiled feebly and nodded.

Rebecca picked up her Jaguar coupe from the staff lot behind the hospital and drove back to her office on Beverley Street. The rest of the day she spent dealing with the usual ear infections, stomach upsets, and women who were terrified they might be pregnant.

After office hours she wasn’t in the same hurry and usually walked the four blocks back to Mount Sinai. She could air her brain and get some exercise at the same time.

She realized later that she had barely given Mrs. Fiori a thought all day. Was that why it hit her so hard when she walked to the nurses’ station that evening? She felt it as soon as the nurse looked up at her. The eyes gave people away. Some unintentional message written on the underside. The way the muscles of the face realigned themselves.

She wanted to be anywhere but here because she sensed the nightmare playing out in the room down the hall. No, she heard the keening of the nightmare, a barely human voice. The wailing that rose up from that part of you that lay quiet most of your life if you were lucky. That part of you that understood the real world viscerally, the careless cruelty and unfairness of it, and only surfaced when summoned by your own tragedy. Not others’, only your own. Otherwise how could you live?

Rebecca stopped in front of the nurse, trying to wrap herself in a layer of professionalism. A doctor didn’t fall apart. A doctor helped others cope. A doctor …

“What happened?” Rebecca asked.

The nurse, a tall middle-aged woman, handed her Mrs. Fiori’s chart. “I tried to phone your office. She just had another stroke.” Her cheeks sagged from effort.

Rebecca stared at the file, but the writing wavered before her eyes. When the words stopped moving, she read that the internist had seen Mrs. Fiori within the last hour. Right in the hospital. Still nothing they could do for her. Blood clot in the brain. Such a small thing to stop a life.

Still in her wool coat, she walked down the hall toward the frantic weeping. She hovered in the doorway, hating her own cowardice. Mrs. Fiori lay facing the ceiling, her once lovely face white, dark hair splayed on the pillow, mouth open.

David. A flashbulb went off and everything stood still in an instant. David lying in the hospital, the same hospital. The same white. The same gone. Gone.

The moment passed. Rebecca saw a nurse in the room, speaking in a low voice to the husband and teenage son. Rebecca had met the family when Mrs. Fiori had been admitted four days ago. It was the daughter, maybe twenty, who keened shrilly, slumped over her mother’s body. The daughter, who resembled her mother so much, with her dark hair and wide cheekbones, she might have been mourning for herself.

Rebecca watched the nurse approach her, gently but firmly lift her from the bed, murmuring words of comfort that slid right past the face swollen with tears.

“Nobody said she would die!” cried the young woman. “She can’t die!”

The nurse looked up and saw Rebecca in the doorway. Now she had to go in. Try to console a family who would be inconsolable. As was their right. She had been through it all herself. She understood only too well. People try to comfort, but there’s really nothing anyone can say. Nobody found the magic words when she was inconsolable.

She stepped into the room. It was airless. She could barely breathe, but she placed her hand on Mr. Fiori’s arm. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t expect it.”

He shifted damp brown eyes to her and nodded. The boy had his arm around his father’s shoulder and seemed to be protecting him from her.

The daughter noticed her entrance. “I don’t understand! She wasn’t supposed to die! I don’t understand!”

“I’m so sorry,” Rebecca said. “There’s always a risk, but she seemed to be doing so well …”

“You didn’t say she might die!” cried the daughter. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

The words hit Rebecca in the stomach. She blinked from the pain.

“She threw off a clot that blocked the artery to her brain. That’s the danger with stroke.”

The daughter stopped wailing and stared at Rebecca as if she had said something offensive. It wasn’t the physical cause of death she didn’t understand. That wasn’t the answer she wanted. Rebecca didn’t have that answer. Would never have it.

“I’m so sorry,” she mumbled and flew from the room toward the elevators.

Don’t think. Just go! Don’t let it break your heart. She stared at the floor numbers descending. Darted out onto the main floor, past the life-sized portraits of the Mount Sinai benefactors hanging on the travertine marble. How many years had she been hurrying down this hall? Past some elderly lady volunteer posted next to a table of used books outside the hospital gift shop. The never-ending lineup of visitors and staff at the coffee stand, impatient for that jolt of caffeine that would hold them to dinner. How many years had she sprinted by it daily?

She didn’t know what was happening to her. It was just over a year since David had died. She’d thought the despondency would subside. That her body would adjust to his absence at the table, in her bed. That she would be able to wake up in the morning without remembering, before anything else, that he was dead. But she became weepy at unexpected moments and sometimes had to excuse herself from company.

She had been a happy person before fate turned her into a widow at thirty-three. Fate? She didn’t believe in fate. Just blind rotten luck. Bad genes and circumstance. If only he hadn’t developed diabetes. If only he hadn’t been so goddamed funny. If only his red hair hadn’t glowed like that above the milky complexion.

His death had robbed her of her optimism. Had she really been an optimistic doctor? Didn’t that just make her stupid — ignoring everything they taught her in medical school about the vulnerability of the human body? Stupid and ready for a fall. After that first big fall, she just seemed to keep falling. She couldn’t have helped Mrs. Fiori. Nobody could. Her daughter probably understood that now. Maybe she had been an optimist too, but the ground had opened up beneath her and swallowed her mother. Maybe the weeping had been for herself.

No point hurrying today. Other Friday evenings she would head out to her parents’ house for dinner. But they were in Santa Barbara for the month. No one was waiting for her to come home. Her mother-in-law had invited her for dinner, but Rebecca had declined. She couldn’t enter that house without finding David everywhere, and all the sadness she was barely keeping at bay threatened to break the delicate barriers she had built around herself, ready to engulf her.

She walked along Elm Street, buttoning her coat against the November chill. Barely glanced up at the grey brick residence for married interns where she had spent the happiest year of her life. David had been healthy then, busy with his painting. They had both been immortal, the way the unthinking young are. She saw death and disease often during that year in the hospital, yet never dreamt it would seize her own life so soon. They had been buoyant with hope then, innocently looking forward to a life together. But the universe hadn’t unfolded as it should. David had lived for only seven more years. He had taken her hope with him to the grave.

As the wind lashed her down McCaul, she pulled up the collar of her wool coat, wrapped the silk scarf tighter around her neck. Winter was coming. Would she keep walking the four blocks back to her office every day in the freezing cold? She needed the exercise.

Baldwin Street. She barely peered sideways at the restaurants and shops, the couples, the groups of university students scouting out places for dinner. She made her way to D’Arcy, the next street south, empty in comparison, soothing with its old semi-detached houses sitting quietly in the dusky light. Only her own steps echoed softly on the pavement.

Even the wind was calmer as she approached Beverley Street. Then an agitated voice broke the silence. Or maybe it was Rebecca’s silence and the woman had been speaking all along, only Rebecca had to get close enough to hear. An accent of some kind.

“… never were any good … You’re spoiled! You’re stupid! You don’t understand anything … and you’re dirty.”

Rebecca slowed down. The voice seemed to be coming from a backyard enclosed by a six-foot-high hedge that smelled musty with autumn. Its leaves had fallen, but the gnarled old branches twisted upon one another in a complicated pattern that hid the yard from the street.

“You don’t deserve to live. You’re stupid, you’re fat, you’re ugly. You should be punished for what you did. You’re a monster! You should’ve died like the rest of them.”

Rebecca stopped. Was it a mother speaking to a child? The voice sounded older than that. Should she interfere?

“Why don’t you wash yourself? Look at your face — anyone can see what you had for lunch. Join the human race. Try at least to look human because you aren’t human, you’re an animal. Even animals clean themselves. You should end it all now — it would be better for you and everyone else.”

Even if it weren’t a child, the threat of violence … Though the voice was not shouting, rather it droned on. More chilling for that. Rebecca stepped with hesitation toward the back door of the house where the hedge began. If she could only see them, she might gauge the danger.

“Get a knife — that’s not so hard — and push it in there, you know, where your heart is supposed to be. I can get you a knife right now and you can do it — save everyone a lot of trouble.”

That was enough for Rebecca. She strode through the opening of the hedge and looked around the yard. Where were they?

“Excuse me!” Rebecca called out.

Inside the hedge now, Rebecca squinted in the dimming light. In front of a wooden shed in the back corner a small old woman sat straight up, alarmed, in a vinyl kitchen chair. A green woollen hat was pulled down over her head, grey hair straggling beneath. Her shoulders shook with terror in an oversized men’s coat. Was she the victim? Rebecca looked around the yard. A child’s wagon sat piled with bulging bags near the woman. Rebecca saw no one else.

“Do you need help?” Rebecca asked, still looking into the shadows of the yard.

The woman stared at her with large dark eyes but said nothing. Her body continued to shiver.

“Is someone trying to hurt you?”

The woman’s face was blank. Her delicate features must have been pretty long ago. Maybe she was just cold.

“I can’t help if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

No reply.

At a loss, Rebecca turned to go.

“She has no heart,” the woman said.

The same voice Rebecca had heard before. She had been talking to herself.

“Who?”

“She.”

“Everyone has a heart,” Rebecca said.

The woman looked down at her feet. “They come at night. Steal the tips off her shoelaces. Look, the plastic tips, they’re gone.”

She was speaking about herself in the third person. Okay. The woman’s running shoes were so dirty, Rebecca couldn’t tell if the tips were there or not. “Why would someone do that?”

The woman looked at her as if she ought to know. “So her shoelaces will come undone. And she’ll trip and fall. And get dirty. They want her to be dirty so she’ll get sick. And die.”

Logical. “Who?”

The woman looked away and pointed half-heartedly to a tree. Rebecca wondered if the people who lived in the house knew they had a squatter in their yard. It would be hard not to notice her. All they had to do was look out their windows.

“My name’s Rebecca. What’s your name?”

“She’s going to sleep now.”

“Out here?”

The woman looked around herself as if for the first time.

“It’s too cold to sleep outside,” Rebecca said. “Would you like me to find you a warm place to sleep?”

“Here!” the woman shouted, agitated. “Stay here! She turns it on.”

Rebecca followed the woman’s eyes and saw a portable heater close to her feet. The filament was starting to turn red and she could feel the warmth from where she stood. An extension cord snaked from inside the shed.

“Okay,” Rebecca said. “Look’s like you’re all set.”

Mind your own business next time, Rebecca thought, as she continued back to her office. Even if she called social services, there weren’t a lot of places for homeless women in the city. The old lady would end up in a psychiatric ward overnight, terror-stricken. Leave it alone. Bad end to a bad day.

Driving home later after her office hours, she felt her stomach grumble, anticipating the matzo ball soup, Greek salad, and potato skins with cheese and bacon that she would pick up from Yitz’s delicatessen on Eglinton Avenue. Her favourites even if they didn’t cover all the food groups. Why shouldn’t she indulge herself now and then? She ate at the kitchen table while reading the Globe and Mail that had come that morning.

At nine o’clock her phone rang.

“Hi, sweetie, what’s up?”

Her mother’s voice always cheered her. “Just loafing in front of the TV.”

“You know,” said her father on the extension, “you lose IQ points for every hour you watch. Your mother’s IQ is down to thirty-eight. She’s addicted to The Young and the Restless.”

Rebecca smiled. Her mother hated soap operas.

“I love her anyway,” her father said.

“Pshaw. How are you feeling?” Her mother always treaded softly around Rebecca’s depression.

“I’m a little down. One of my patients died in hospital today. Just fifty-three.”

“I’m so sorry. What from?”

“She had a stroke. I thought she’d pull through. I wasn’t there when it happened.”

“Shouldn’t blame yourself, dear. You’re not God.”

Rebecca smiled. Her mother was trying to make her feel better, but inadvertently underscored a doctor’s arrogance. “You still believe in God?”

A moment of hesitation. “Most of the time.”

“If anyone cares, I still believe in God.” Her father. “He’s got a long white beard and lives on a mountain in Israel. He looks like Charlton Heston.”

“Ignore him. He’s in one of his silly moods.”

Rebecca didn’t remember when he wasn’t. Which was fine by her.

“I want to make my brilliant girl smile.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Did you have dinner?” her mother asked.

“Yitz’s matzo balls aren’t as good as yours.”

“Now you’re making me feel guilty.”

“You should be proud, Flo, you passed on a Jewish skill: how to make your family feel guilty.”

“I don’t want you to feel guilty,” Rebecca said. “I want you to have fun.” It was partly true. She wanted them to enjoy themselves, but she missed them. “You only have another two weeks.”

“Did you speak to Susan?” Her mother’s voice took on an edge.

“Not lately.”

“I’m worried about her.”

“Oh, Flo, you worry too much. She’ll be fine.”

“I told you, Mitch. I haven’t seen her like this before. She’s been pregnant three times and she’s never been like this. What d’you think, Rebecca? Should we worry about your sister?”

Rebecca wondered: did they bring up touchy subjects when they were actually in the same room together, or only on the extension when they called her long-distance?

“Susan’s pretty resilient,” Rebecca said. “Her pregnancy’s progressing normally. She just has to accept that she’s having a fourth child. And she must be tired. Who wouldn’t be?”

When Susan had discovered she was pregnant again, she’d called Rebecca from Montreal and wept into the phone. Her husband was an observant Jew; there was no question of an abortion.

“I was looking forward to saying ‘my daughter the doctor and my daughter the lawyer,’” her father quipped for the hundredth time.

“Don’t ever say that to Susan, Mitch. She’s upset as it is.”

Susan had finally applied for law school after years of waiting, and would have started that fall, but had to ask for a deferral to have the baby. How was she going to have the energy to start the next fall? The baby would be less than a year old and the three boys all under nine.

“I’ll call her tomorrow and see how she is,” Rebecca said.

“Good girl,” said her father.

“Only wait until sundown,” said her mother. “You know they don’t pick up the phone on Saturday.”

Rebecca spent the next hour tackling the clutter in her kitchen. Too many publications arrived automatically on her doorstep because of her obligatory membership in medical organizations: the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the journal of the Royal Society for Physicians and Surgeons, the Ontario Medical Association Review, the Medical Post, and on and on. It was one way to keep up with the constant flow of medical developments, but her house was filled with paper. All she could do was stack the journals on the bookshelf until they became outdated.

In fact, she had signed up for a day of lectures on Saturday, an update for general practitioners sponsored by a few drug companies. She unfolded the brochure and read off the list of titles: a new maintenance treatment in asthma; new procedures in obstetrics and gynecology; updates for treatment of depression and anxiety; new medications in pain management; developments in pediatrics.

In the middle of the centre page was a black and white photo of a man with intelligent eyes and a hint of a smile, his strong chin thrust forward. Dr. Mustafa Salim, Chairman of Hassan Pharmaceuticals. He was a special guest visiting from Egypt, apparently, where the founder of his company was a medical advisor to the government. A few days ago she had picked up the University of Toronto Bulletin near the coffee wagon in the hospital and found the same picture of Dr. Salim. He was giving several more lectures next week on pain medication research, one in the pharmacy building, one at the U of T bookstore: “New Investment in Egypt after the Peace Accord.”

Then the phone rang. Nesha. Her heart lifted. He would be the only one calling after ten in the evening. San Francisco was three hours behind. He called on the weekends that he didn’t fly in. She picked up the receiver.

“Rebecca?”

She smiled at the lilting sound of her name in his mouth. It suggested so many things: his lips on her neck, her legs wrapped around his, their bodies arching toward each other.

“Rebecca, is that you?”

“Sorry, I was preoccupied.” She couldn’t tell him his voice had transported her to the bedroom.

“Preoccupied with what?”

She looked down at the brochure. “Oh. Um, I’m going to some lectures tomorrow and they’ve snagged an interesting guest speaker for the luncheon. He’s Egyptian. You follow Middle East affairs more than I do. He seems to be doing a lecture circuit. Something about promoting investment in Egypt after the peace accord with Israel.”

“Investment in Egypt! That’s a laugh. Sadat may be working on peace, but the radical elements in his country won’t just sit by. Ever heard of the Muslim Brotherhood?”

“No.”

He paused. “Never mind. How are you?”

“Fine.” Could he tell she was barely fine? “Who’re the Muslim Brotherhood?”

“You sure you want to know this? They’re a grassroots organization that puts out the equivalent of soup kitchens in Egypt. Sort of like the Salvation Army here. Except that the Salvation Army wants you to believe in Jesus and love your neighbour, while the Muslim Brotherhood wants you to kill your neighbour. They assassinated the Egyptian prime minister in the fifties because he was too tight with the British.”

“Why do you know so much about Egypt?”

“The Middle East interests me. So much potential and so little progress. Long ago, Muslims were an advanced civilization. Inventive, tolerant. But they’ve been going backwards for centuries. When Jews were dying in pogroms in Poland and Russia in the 1800s, they realized they needed a homeland like everybody else. They wanted the tiny part of the desert that was theirs nearly two thousand years ago. But the Arabs didn’t want them taking even a fraction of their desert, like there wasn’t enough of it. Nothing’s changed. They’ve taken over from the Nazis.”

Nesha had seen his family murdered by the Nazis. He was sensitive about Jewish survival.

“None of the Arab countries are stable enough for investment,” he said. “I wouldn’t give them a penny.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not looking to invest. I’m just trying to learn some new medicine.”

“Didn’t mean to bend your ear. You’re a conscientious doctor, keeping up like that. My hat’s off to you.”

“You don’t wear a hat.”

“I wore a baseball hat the first time we met.”

“An aberration. I’ve never seen you in one since.”

“I’m wearing one right now.”

“No, you’re not. What colour is it?”

“You don’t know everything about me, you know.”

“Well, I’d like to know everything about you.”

“Well, I’d like to be there holding you in my arms right now.”

“So what’s stopping you?” she said, picturing his bow-shaped mouth close to the phone.

Find Me Again Back to Top

Sarah

September 1979

Sarah felt old as the world. The buoyancy of the airport crowd dismayed her. All those expectant faces fixed in one direction: the glass door through which would spill those they loved. There was no door on earth like that for her. No people like that for her. Certainly not Halina. Sarah had never thought she would see her again. Or at least she had hoped. So how had she ended up here, in the centre of the mob, the dizzying excitement, the impatience of the young men shifting foot to foot, the brown family sharing pizza out of Tupperware?

Through the plate glass partition she watched the passengers mill about, collecting luggage from the rotating carousel. Waiting for Halina was like staring down a tunnel into her former life. The tunnel had always lain in ambush, but so far she had managed to avoid falling in. Now Halina beckoned to her from a darkness that had been waiting there for forty years.

Halina had not asked to be met at the airport, had given no other information in her letter than the date of her arrival. It had taken only a phone call to the Polish airline for Sarah to learn the flight time. There was only one flight a day from Warsaw.

Halina would be sixty-four now. Odd the way she had stopped aging in Sarah’s mind. All she could remember was the way Halina had looked just before the war. Tall and shapely at twenty, she stood behind the sparkling glass counter of the jewelry shop in Kraków, her straw-coloured hair in a sleek pageboy. On the wall behind her hung an elaborate clock in a carved gilt frame darkened with age. The clock’s hands had stopped at two. A broken clock will not inspire confidence in our customers, Sarah’s father had said, coming into work one morning. Sixteen-year-old Sarah had gawked at Halina, awed by her beauty. The clock isn’t broken, Halina said to her. It’s waiting for us, and she began to laugh, her coral-red lips baring white teeth.

The memory was so elusive after all these years, Sarah wasn’t sure it was real. She only knew that four years later the Germans attacked Poland and she desperately needed to get out of the city. She turned to Halina who had worked for Sarah’s parents for six years in the store. She was the only Gentile Sarah could trust. So she saved herself, her husband. But at what cost? She came back to Kraków when the calamity was over. Only there was one more calamity to befall her. At Halina’s door.

Six years of war had taken the freshness out of Halina’s complexion. Her large bones kept her from looking hungry, but the shop was gone. Everything was gone. Every one. Her precious one. Halina stood at the door saying something she couldn’t comprehend. She heard the words but they made no sense to her. They did not penetrate. She finally heard Halina say, You mustn’t blame me. Yusek stood beside her, patting Sarah’s head as though she were a dog punished by mistake. It wasn’t my fault, Halina said. There was nothing I could do.

Sarah flinched. A small Indian girl bumped into her arm, and the airport materialized around her.

She moved her head from side to side to loosen the knotted muscles in her neck. Deep breath from the bottom of her diaphragm, the way she taught her students. Not that she was going to burst into song, but it felt good to gain a modicum of control over something. People kept moving in front of her, blocking her view.

What would Halina look like, at sixty-four? Sarah was pleased at how well she had aged. She dyed the grey in her hair brown, had gained only fifteen pounds after forty years. Still, would they recognize each other?

Passengers stepped out through the automatic doors at a slow but steady pace. Sarah spotted two blonde women heading for the glass doors, one pushing a luggage cart brimming with suitcases. A shock of recognition when she looked more closely at the taller one struggling with the cart. In a grey business suit: Halina. Her hair thinner, a whiter blonde, her waist thickened but her legs still shapely in pumps. She carried herself like a queen, head held high, her eyebrows arched critically. Her companion was much younger, though her hair was a startling white, lifted off her neck and pinned into a roll. Her pale face was unhindered by make-up. Sarah felt a sudden pang through the heart. It was the daughter. Yes, she was sick, but at least Halina had a daughter. She had had a daughter for all those years.

Sarah stepped around the crowd, keeping them in sight. Mother and daughter advancing in her direction. The arriving passengers were separated from the waiting crowd by ropes that framed a corridor of escape. Halina, looking haggard after the long flight from Poland, examined the faces of the crowd and suddenly settled on Sarah. Sarah had forgotten that she’d be unexpected. Had just assumed that Halina didn’t know anyone in Toronto and took it upon herself to pick them up.

The cautious look on Halina’s face kept Sarah in her spot. Thirty-five years separated them. That, and events neither could control. The hands of the clock waited as Sarah searched Halina’s face for the young woman she used to know. Halina hurriedly peered around, as if someone else might be waiting for her, then handed her daughter the large black leather handbag she was clutching. She headed straight for Sarah,

She placed her hands on Sarah’s arms and kissed her on both cheeks, stopping short of an embrace. "I didn’t want to trouble you," she said in Polish, using the familiar "you" as if it weren’t a lifetime ago since they’d last met.

"It was very kind of you," she continued. "I would’ve recognized you anywhere. You haven’t changed at all. You look so young."

"You, also, have not changed. Still beautiful." She replied in Polish, though the language felt strange in her mouth, like someone else’s tongue forming the words. She rarely spoke her native language, lately only in times of distress, like when David had died.

"This must be your daughter," she said in Polish looking at the younger woman who had approached and was leaning on the cart.

"This is Natalka," said Halina.

The daughter came away from the cart and held out her hand. "How do you do?"

Accented English. Her long elegant neck, the high cheekbones, gave her the look of a gazelle.

"You speak English?" Sarah asked her.

"I studied a little."

Natalka’s green eyes illuminated her pale face, the wisps of white hair that had escaped the pins to curl around her cheeks. The skin beneath her eyes was dark. She was striking in an olive green cape. When Halina had written about her daughter’s leukemia, Sarah had felt an abstract kind of sympathy. Too bad, so young to be that ill. Now with Natalka beside her, the horror of the thing became real. Halina was going through the same thing with Natalka that Sarah had experienced with David. But she didn’t feel sorry for the mother, only the daughter. Halina had had her for all those years. She should be grateful.

"Was it a long flight?" Sarah asked.

Natalka looked at her watch. "We left early this morning on the train to Warsaw. Then the plane left shortly after noon." She twisted her arm around so that Sarah could look at her watch. "This is the hour for us." It was fifteen minutes past midnight. Barely dinner time in Toronto.

"You must be exhausted," Sarah said.

She turned to Halina, with sympathy, only to find her attention elsewhere. She appeared to be communicating with someone at a distance. Very slightly shaking her head, giving a short jerk of her hand near her waist where it might go unnoticed. Sarah kept smiling at Natalka but searched the crowd for the target of Halina’s signals. Sarah was impatient with the intrigue: if Halina knew people here, why didn’t she say so?

"Was someone picking you up?" Sarah asked.

Halina flushed and abruptly began to move the luggage cart toward the exit. "No, no, we were going to take a taxi."

Sarah took a last look at the people still waiting for passengers: no one appeared particularly interested in them.

"Where are you staying?" she asked them.

Halina took a piece of paper from her jacket pocket and handed it to Sarah. In a large bold hand the name and address of an apartment hotel on Yonge Street in midtown Toronto.

It was five-thirty and rush hour when they hit the 401 highway.

"I can’t believe all the cars!" Halina cried. "Are we far from the hotel?"

"About half an hour," Sarah said.

Halina was watching out the side mirror as they drove. Was she expecting someone to follow them? Sarah began to check her rearview mirror but didn’t know what she was looking for.

One time she checked in the mirror and found Natalka watching out the window with cool intelligent eyes. She really was lovely with good skin, though pale, and a high forehead. Had her hair turned white during her illness? Natalka met her eyes in the mirror and Sarah looked away.

Halina had settled into her seat and seemed to doze off as they travelled east along the highway. Sarah drove her Camaro at barely the speed limit in the right lane, letting cars pass. She used the highway out of necessity, but she didn’t like it. The speed frightened her. Several cars stayed behind her in the slow lane. The one immediately behind was a blue compact. At one point it passed her, leaving a black sedan in its wake. She didn’t recognize the makes of cars the way David had. David could’ve named every car driving past her. He’d loved cars since he was a little boy. The Camaro had been his until he fell in love with the sporty red Jaguar. He told her the Camaro would make her younger, so she took it off his hands to please him. Her darling David.

It was nearly a year now since he’d been gone. She couldn’t bring herself to say "die," to even think "die." Children were not supposed to die before their parents. She didn’t know how she had survived it; she had simply gone on. Her heart had not stopped as she thought it would. Her lungs kept breathing, though every now and then she gasped for air. The room would become close and suddenly there was no air and she prayed for death. In that moment she would think: What would I regret? My sister, Malka and her husband. Rebecca, who suffered when David died and still cannot bear my presence because my face reminds her of his. My music... Then she began to breathe again and the moment passed.

The car radio flickered into her consciousness. "U.S. President Jimmy Carter met Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at his Camp David retreat to discuss plans for peace in the Middle East. Mr. Sadat denied rumours that he has received death threats at home from factions opposed to his conciliatory position on Israel."

Sarah switched the channel to some classical music. She exited the highway at Yonge Street and drove south about a mile to the hotel. It turned out to be an elegant four-storey building in an art deco style.

"Let’s see if they can help with the luggage," Sarah said, leading the way to the entrance. Halina carried the large leather purse on her arm.

Behind a polished wooden desk sat a muscular middle-aged man with a moustache, his dark hair thin at the front. He surveyed them without expression.

"This is Mrs. Nytkowa and her daughter," Sarah said, taking charge as the English speaker. "You have a room reserved for them."

His brows furrowed as he glanced at some papers out of their sight. "Mrs--?"

"Nytkowa."

His thick lips pursed, he flipped some pages, shook his head. "You sure you have the right place?" Slight accent, east European.

Sarah was surprised when Halina began in accented English. "Sir, this is Natalka Czarnowa, famous concert pianist. Pan Baranowski bring us..."

"Pan Baranowski?" he exclaimed, sitting up very straight. "He don’t say nothing to me."

"You call him!" Halina said.

The man picked up the phone wordlessly and dialed.

Sarah took another look at Natalka. A scrap of memory tried to surface. Natalka Czarnowa. Fifteen or twenty years back there’d been a pianist who had caused a stir with her idiosyncratic rendition of a waltz in the Chopin competition in Warsaw She developed a reputation in Poland, then performed in the Eastern bloc-- Moscow, Kiev, Budapest. Every now and then Sarah came across a notice about her but never connected it to Halina’s daughter since she didn’t know her married name.

The concierge waited through several rings, then put the phone down. He shrugged. "I got no instructions."

Sarah had not scheduled any students that evening, knowing she’d be busy with her guests. She hadn’t counted on putting them up for the night, though.

"I’ll take you to my place," she said finally. She turned to the man. "Here’s my phone number." She handed him one of the cards she kept in her purse in case she came upon someone who wanted singing lessons. "This is where they’ll be."

The man curled his lip, then studied the card as if it would be useful for killing cockroaches.


To Die In Spring  Back to Top

Goldie

Wednesday, March 28, 1979

As soon as Goldie stepped onto the Bathurst Street bus she knew she was in trouble. The strangers around her stared with cold faces. The familiar palpitations began in her neck, her chest, as she determined to find the one she was looking for: it was in the eyes, the way a person held his head. This bus was why she didn't go downtown, this danger to her survival that the doctor hadn't counted on. Oh why had the doctor moved so far away! Goldie preferred to walk everywhere she could. The area around Bathurst and Eglinton where she lived proliferated with every kind of store. There was little she could not buy within a three block radius of her apartment.

Today was her first appointment in the doctor's new office. If she made it. On the bus now, all her energy polarized to keep her standing in the aisle without bolting out the exit at each stop. In her head she tried to reproduce Dr. Temple's calm voice telling her that she was in Toronto, she was safe. Most of the seats had filled and more people got on. Gripping the bars, she moved further down the bus when suddenly she saw a young man who reminded her of Enrique. Mama, you're a big girl, he would've said. You gotta try. It'll be all right. Besides, you look great. She pushed Enrique from her mind.

She looked into each face to make sure she was not being followed. Most of the passengers avoided her eyes; Torontonians were so reserved. But she continued methodically row after row, face after face: immigrant women with their tightly curled hair, students with books, old men and women, their surfaces like maps of forgotten places.

Did Dr. Temple understand how hard it was for her to just go out on the street, her own familiar street, never mind all the way down to the new medical office? Goldie didn't thank the doctor for saving her when she'd finally mustered the courage to swallow the valium. She did thank her for caring, for understanding her pain. Ah, there was nothing else to be done; she had to go.

Now this new thing, this cousin's voice from so long ago on the phone suddenly. She didn't like to think about that time. She had escaped from Poland when she was twenty, left behind everyone she loved. Only her sister Chana survived. Poor Chana who had ended up in a camp. Thin and frail after typhus, she finally joined Goldie in Argentina after the war. And now this forgotten cousin from Poland who had somehow escaped. The rest of her family had become dust and ashes. She owed them this much, to help the cousin find what he was looking for. They would meet soon, he said, after all these years. Where was he living now? California? They had only exchanged a few letters now and then. Maybe she could find the address he needed. Give him something of importance when they finally met. She had to work up her stamina for that kind of adventure. Maybe she would go next week.

Dr. Temple's voice, if she had managed to hear it at all, popped like a balloon when the young man Enrique's age stood up and looked at her directly.

"Please," he motioned behind himself. "Take my seat."

Goldie was too shocked to understand what he wanted.

"Sit down. Go ahead."

She looked into his face to see if this was a trap, but his voice was English, his manner Toronto. Not taking any chances, she nervously moved further down the aisle, leaving the young man to fall back into his seat, embarrassed.

A block below St. Clair, a short, dark-haired woman walked to the exit and stepped down on the stair. She was thick as a sausage in a cheap ski jacket over her homemade paisley dress. A group of teenagers in fashionably ragged jeans had gotten on at St. Clair and still held the driver's attention. When the woman pulled the cord at her stop, the bus careened past. The students were so noisy that it was possible only Goldie, who was close, heard the woman shout, "!Abra la puerta!" The woman began to beat her small fat fist against the glass of the door and again yelled, "!Abra la puerta!"

In a flash Goldie found herself again in her apartment in Buenos Aires that night when all had been lost.

!Abra la puerta! !Abra la puerta!

A cluster of fists hammered at the door of her apartment. The voices in her nightmare cried !Abra la puerta! !Abra la puerta! and she had woken up from the dream that had once been her life. As soon as she unlocked the door, four men in plainclothes jumped inside with guns and handcuffed her from behind. They twisted her arms with such careless venom that she blinked in bewildered pain. They ran through the apartment searching for others and for this, at least, she felt relief.

Where is he? one of them asked her, the others milling about.

Who? she said.

The man threw a blanket over her head then pushed her out the door in her pyjamas. They will get you to talk, Jewish whore.

A gun barrel was pushed into her side as they rode down the elevator. The blanket still over her head, they threw her down onto the floor of a car. Their feet perched on her body, the gun barrel stuck in her back as they drove away.

Finally they arrived in the basement of some official building. First she was blindfolded, then without any preamble, she was put on the machine. She didn't know it was the the machine then; she merely knew her fate was catching up with her. Someone placed her on a cot, attached what she later realized were electrodes to her mouth, and pushed a button. A fire, a howling, started in her mouth. She fell into the noise headlong, forgetting her name, forgetting her face. The plague had carried off her family in Europe thirty years before; it finally remembered to come back for her. She was being punished for surviving.

Later on she found out that all the prisoners were given the machine on their arrival to rattle them into submission. Routine. Then to business. At the beginning the conversations went like this:

Where is your son?

I don't know.

A sharp slap across the face.

How can I help you if you don't cooperate? We don't want to hurt him. We just want to speak to him about his subversive activities.

He has no subversive activities. He's a musician. He writes songs.

Songs? Propaganda that describes us as animals. Lies that give comfort to the enemy.

Students are your enemies?

Your son is young. Maybe he fell in with a bad crowd. We understand all that. We don't want to hurt him. Where is he?

Out of your reach, Mr. Interrogator. Nowhere you can find him.

The fist smashed her mouth. That stubborn mouth. Her interrogator, once interested in her son's whereabouts, now enjoyed torturing her for her own shortcomings: her uncowed demeanor, her Jewishness, her stubborn mouth that refused obedience. An uncontrollable mouth. Not that she didn't want to control it, only it was directly attached to her brain and her brain she couldn't control. With the result that her tongue, no matter how she manoeuvered it, succeeded in inflaming her interrogator to heights of sadistic rage. What was worse for an old woman¾sitting in pyjamas on the wet floor of a cell, praying the scorpions wouldn't find her? or sitting in the interrogator's chair, her only human contact slamming his fist into the side of her ribs, searching for something she could not give him: herself.

After some weeks, when Goldie lay filthy on the stone floor, her pyjamas soiled from the remnants of bodily functions, her interrogator grew bolder. When fetching her from her cell, he neglected to blindfold her. She now saw he was fat, with short greasy hair. He was ageless, sexless, she would not recognize him on the street. She allowed herself a fleeting moment of hope before coming to a halt in the room. Seeing it for the first time, she was perversely satisfied with its shabbiness¾it could have been a converted kitchen. She smiled to herself, surprised that she was able. She was being fried in an old kitchen. The smell was damp, musty, like long ago fried fish.

This amuses you?

Goldie startled at this German-accented Spanish. She twisted her head toward the source but found the figure in shadow.

Jorge, the old whore finds her situation amusing. We must show her the seriousness of her position.

The faceless voice was German; she would hear it in her dreams long after the danger was over. Her mother, her father, her brothers, aunts, cousins, grandparents had all marched into the maw of history because of a German voice. The guttoral rasps in the throat still had the power to terrorize her, the deceptively rounded vowels that could pierce a heart.

They placed her on a cot. The fat interrogator attached electrodes to her mouth with clumsy fingers. The anxiety was not on her account, she realized, but resided in the shadows with the faceless German who had, no doubt, given instructions.

The arrogant voice begins:

Jewish cow, is it not true that you and your son are part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over Patagonia?

Even his Spanish sounds German.

We know everything, whore. We even know the name chosen for the new homeland: the Republic of Andinia. Does that surprise you? What is your son's role in the conspiracy?

She hesitates.

Then someone pushes a button somewhere and the fire starts in her mouth. She no longer knows who she is, she no longer cares. She can't stop shaking, even when they tire of this recreation. Goldie never knows whose finger actually pushes the button, but she's convinced it's the German whose voice fills her dreams.

"Excuse me, lady."

The memory of pain, the need to escape from it, brought Goldie back to the Bathurst Street bus, still on her way to the doctor's.

"Excuse me, lady."

More students had boarded, a thicket of bodies manoeuvering around her. A dark heavy man with angry eyes was heading toward her and she knew they'd found her. He was a tall man for whom she, all five-foot-one of her, would be candy. The words in her head conquered time and space to land in his mouth. We will get you to talk, Jewish whore.

In a second, Goldie pushed her way roughly through some students.

"Well pardon us, lady."

Standing on the step, feeling the kidnapper's breath on the back of her neck, she pulled the cord continuously. It chimed every few seconds.

"Okay lady, we get the message," one kid said. "Maybe she has to go to the bathroom."

When the bus finally came to a stop a block above College Street, Goldie hurled herself out the door and began to run. If only she hadn't worn these heels. She dashed across College Street. She'd run like this in her nightmares, aching from fear, past eyes and eyes and more eyes, in shoes that wouldn't stay on. She could hardly breathe now after two blocks. Blisters had formed on the heels of both feet. Danger lurked behind lamposts, windowblinds, in the most quiescent of eyes. She would never be safe. She stumbled once, twice, finally through the blur of her exhaustion she turned to search for her pursuer.

No one.

She stopped. The overcast sky hung low over rooftops, cast shadows on the street. Like a loose-necked owl, she scanned in all directions at once to check for danger. The old houses whispered their secrets, their paint in shreds, their rails studded with rust. I will follow you till you drop. I will get you one day, I am always there.

So she was spared another day. She had surprised him and escaped. At least she had reached College Street. Goldie limped up to the cement island to wait for the streetcar. If she hadn't been so absorbed with the streetcar approaching in the murky distance, Goldie would, no doubt, have noticed the swarthy little man step up beside her on the island.

When she finally decided she was standing in the right place to go east on College, she turned, startled at the unexpected proximity. How had this one slipped through her defences so easily? The intruder was disguised as an Italian labourer in jeans and heavy plaid shirt, carrying a lunch pail big enough for an unassembled machine gun. How stupid did they think she was? He could have a half dozen guns in there, or knives. And handcuffs, they would need handcuffs. He had dark greasy hair like the other, but his skin was coarse and red as if he worked outside. They were so clever about these things; there was nothing they wouldn't do to fool her.

Glaring at him produced no reaction. He looked back, but blankly. These were confrontations she would rather have avoided, but she had to defend herself.

"Stupid they must think I am," she addressed the little man finally. "Stupid and blind."

The man blinked then smiled with brown crooked teeth. "You 'a trouble, lady?"

"Me you don't fool. I know they send you for to get me. I know their dirty tricks."

The man looked around, as if an explanation might hang in the air, as if someone might translate. Failing that, he boldly proceeded.

"Ahh," he lifted his free hand (the one that would hold the gun in the lunchbox) "my hand she's a-dirty. I no toucha. You no worry."

"You don't take me so easy. Not this time."

The little man continued to smile but it was forced now. When the streetcar stopped in front of him, he motioned for Goldie to get on first.

She couldn't believe the audacity. Crossing her arms, she planted herself on the island like a tree waiting for the storm.

"I'm not so stupid like that," she said.

The man quickly climbed aboard and when inside, turned on the top step to face Goldie one last time. This was it, she thought, now comes the gun, the knife, the last pain through the heart. Hello, Enrique.

Before the doors folded shut, he opened his decaying mouth and replied, "You too olda for me, lady."